Funny thing is that these are people who can actually afford to not need to pirate. At least college students have a decent excuse; not that it justifies it, but you can at least see where they're coming from. I find it hard to believe that any senator is so hard-up for cash that he just HAS to pirate his movies because all of his cash is completely tied-up in bills and other essentials.

I certainly am not arguing populist morality. Dan Ariely devoted about 10 years of his life to studying honesty and lying. You just compared small amounts of theft to murder. Those are two completely different things. Ariely's studies have confirmed that the majority of people lie, cheat and steal just enough to still feel honest but to get things they want a little bit easier. I'm not excusing it and I'm not making excuses for it to be ok. That is just reality. Furthermore, the more removed from actual money the stealing becomes, the easier it becomes for people as a whole to justify it with themselves.

It's easy to take the moral high ground in an issue like this. In every country in the world, the majority of that countries people feel that their country is politically the most corrupt nation in the world. This is just an extension of that. The news is not surprising but people use it to justify their feelings on the political machine in general. The most likely outcome is that given the opportunity, it's easier to justify stealing the movie than it is stealing the monetary amount the movie sells for. Keep in mind that this knowledge is statistical in nature and as all cases with statistical evidence, does not apply to individuals. Statistics only apply to populations of people.

But so many people behave more morally in regarding to piracy at the very least, it's far more than 1% of the population who doesn't pirate and I don't believe there isn't a correlation between people trying to maintain a engaged and honest approach to the law and not pirating things, so in a job where its especially required of them, people should be able to stop. I'm not accusing them of corruption, I'm accusing them of doing something that they should be fighting against and put themselves into the publics eye for. If 1% of the public don't cheat in small ways, then it should be easy to find an elected body of comprising only .0000015% of the population that is made up of those people. Representatives aren't meant to be average, they're meant to be our very best

I would be inclined to agree that it should be easy to fill the lawmaking bodies of the land with such a small population of honest people. But how do you tell the liars from the honest people. Ariely's work revealed that a liar will say he is not a liar, an honest person will say he is not a liar, and the vast majority of people who are lying about always telling the truth honestly think they are not liars. The 1% mentioned above is actually anecdotal, not a true statistic. The statistical knowledge I am speaking about was not listed by me with actual percentage numbers, I didn't mean to mislead. The main issue persists, the majority of people lie a little bit, just enough to still feel like honest people.

You are persisting in something of a fantasy and I don't mean that in a bad way. Just because someone holds a position such as lawmaker, police office, anything like that, they are expected to be above being human. That isn't a realistic view of how people should view other people. All people are flawed, even the honest to god honest people who never lie, cheat, or steal from anyone. They aren't perfect people, they are only above average in one regard in the context of this conversation.

should also account for the fact that some of this stuff is staffers dling junk to their laptops and office pcs while at work, since staffers tend to be college age they would be wholly torrent savy.

also a good reason why you need hard term limits and ways to get money out of politics, total public funding, line item veto, hard cap term limits for all branches of govt. too much buying and selling of votes, and it needs to stop period.

Meh. I mean, sure, if any of the people downloading this stuff supported the US' bewilderingly unhinged intellecual property laws, then they're just plain hypocrites, but otherwise, I do not much care.

You folks familiar with Neil Gaiman's experiment? There's a video on youtube of him talking on that subject. And he did actually perform an experiment. Now, it's the kind of thing that should be carefully replicated a few times to be sure, but the results were interesting.

Well, first of all i would question their methods. the simple method to see ips is to pirate yourself, but then the method is illegal and cant be used in court. another one is to take the information from a tracker, in which case they needed to have a deal with a tracker. that is better. but not reliable. if i were to pirate, the tracker would see me as a house of prezidency of Lithuania, despite me not being anywhere near it. Ip spoofing for utorrent is not hard. Also, any decent tracker will already have automatic ban on all government IPs.

Therumancer: Until that happens it's a clever jibe, but we actually have little evidence that a crime was committed. You could take the information as presented here and spin it a few differant ways. I could for example also imply with this data that a member of The House was bribed through being given the perk of free access to his favorite TV shows.

Interesting theory but quite incorrect. No legitimate internal source is going to use file names like "The.Good.Dinosaur.DVDRIP.XviD-ZEKTORM" or "CSI.NY.S09E04.Unspoken.HDTV.XviD-LOL[ettv]" - those are public or private tracker torrent file names, no question about it.

OT: I'd like to think this would be investigated. I'm not expecting politicians to be whiter than white but if they're stupid enough to use official government IPs for illegal activity (or to employ interns etc who do) then they deserve the discomfort and potential humiliation of an investigation, at the very least.

Oh sure, your probably right, there is no doubt of that. But at the same time it can be argued that politicians might be using torrents for the same reasons a lot of other people do including relative quality, file transfer speed based on where they happen to be, and other things. You could take any one of the thousands of defenses made legitimizing and defending torrents and use it to defend these people as easily as "Bob the downloader". It's like with ROMs, they exist in a legal gray area if you legitimatly own the cartridge, which is why so many sites have gotten away with distributing them publically over the years.

My point is that while pretty damning, nothing was actually proven here, to the point of it being meaningless. For all we know the guys DLing it have legitimate permission to access this media, and while it makes sense that they would want to get it from official services, there are theoretical reasons they might be using Rips from "The Pirate Bay".

I'm not defending the house, so much as saying that it seems more along the lines of speculative libel, encouraging people to read into something that isn't yet proven. While entertaining, I'm not always fond of such journalistic techniques since they can very easily backfire.

Or in short I'm just picking for the sake of having something to ramble about on The Internet. :)